|
|
English edition
Nov
1996
240 pp.
Paperback
13X20.5 cm
$16.95
LE 75.00
ISBN
978 977 424 389 9
For sale only in the Middle East
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Arabian Nights and Days
|
E-mail to a friend
Print
|
Naguib Mahfouz
Translated by
Denys Johnson-Davies
Drawing on the characters and the spirit of the classic A Thousand and One Nights, Arabian Nights and Days is a significant departure for Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz. Though he is best known for chronicling his own times, in this novel, first published in Arabic in 1982, Mahfouz injects new life into an Arabic masterpiece.
Though it is set in an Islamic city in medieval times, the modern reader will find much in this novel that is surprisingly familiar. It depicts a city plagued by widespread corruption among its most powerful citizens, and a pervasive sense of social unrest and insecurity. The chief of police is kept particularly busy dealing with the underground activities of various religious sects that are intent on changing the unscrupulous regime. Amid all of this, as in the Thousand and One Nights, genies appear out of bottles accidentally opened by innocent individuals, affecting their lives in exciting, sometimes detrimental ways.
Famed for his skill as a storyteller, Naguib Mahfouz has here produced a novel that is as colorful and entertaining as the book that inspired it.
Naguib Mahfouz was born in 1911 in the crowded Cairo district of Gamaliya. He wrote nearly 40 novel-length works, plus hundreds of short stories and numerous cinema plots and scenarios. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. He died in Cairo on August 30, 2006 at the age of 94.
Denys Johnson-Davies has produced more than thirty volumes of translation of modern Arabic literature, including The Essential Tawfiq al-Hakim (AUC Press, 2008), The Essential Yusuf Idris (AUC Press, 2009), and The Essential Naguib Mahfouz (AUC Press, 2011). He was described by Edward Said as “the leading Arabic–English translator of our time.” Johnson-Davies received the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2007 for Personality of the Year in the Field of Culture
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
